A hand came around the corner. The hand had a gun in it.

Smith brought the sap down hard across the guy’s wrist. A snap. The guy yelped. The gun flew, slid across the floor. Smith slapped a meaty hand on the guy’s forearm, pulled him around the corner.

He knocked the Harley-Davidson cap off the guy’s head, patted his coat down, and found an Old-West-style revolver. Smith smelled the barrel before sticking it in his belt, gave the guy a shake. “Who are you?”

“Jesus, my wrist’s busted.”

“I asked you a question,” Smith said.

“I don’t feel so good.”

“That’s a shame. Hold still.” Smith had him by the back of the coat.

The guy sagged, wanted to lie down. He groaned, leaned forward, and vomited.

“Christ!” Smith let go of the coat, stepped back, puke splashing on his shoes. The smell almost made him heave too.

The guy took off, running hunched over, clutching his busted wrist to his chest.

“Shit.” Smith took one step after him, planted his shoe square in the puddle of puke. His feet flew out from under him. He landed on his back. Hard. The air knocked out of him. He tried to suck in breath, but it was a long few seconds before he could breathe normally. He sat up. A raw spot on his hip where he’d fallen on his brass knuckles. He’d be sore for a week.

He gathered the pistols, limped back upstairs, wondering how he’d explain this to the boss.

Smith lumbered back into the old professor’s office. Valentine and Jenks looked at him expectantly.

But Jones read Smith’s face, saw the pistols in his hand. The boss could always size up a situation in no time. “Who was it?”

Smith sighed. “Some guy. He got away.” He dumped the pistols onto Valentine’s desk. Smith didn’t need any more guns.

“For Christ’s sake,” the old man said. “What happened?”

“I fell down.”

“What’s that on your pants?”

“Vomit.”

Jones stood, joints creaking. “Forget it. I want to hear the poetry reading. Let’s go.”

Red Zach was sick and tired of Oklahoma, farmhouses, rednecks, and being jerked around. He had to take care of this shit quick, or he’d look weak. He couldn’t go back to St. Louis without his property and Harold Jenks’s head on a stick.

But it was taking too damn long. How hard could it be to find a man in this two-bit town?

Okay, he was getting tense. He closed his eyes and began his breathing exercises. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Long, controlled breaths. It wasn’t working. Damn. He hated being on the road so long. Everything he needed was at home. His yoga workout videotapes, aroma therapy candles, the really good CD with the ocean noises. He needed all of it to keep from going nuts and getting an ulcer.

His cell phone bleated in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and flipped it open. “What?”

It was Maurice on the other end. He sounded strange, weak, like maybe it was a bad connection. Maurice told him to get a pencil. Zach wrote the words Albatross Hall on a paper napkin. A building at the school.

“What is it?” Zach asked. “Dormitory or something?”

Nothing.

“Maurice?” Zach looked at the cell phone’s display, made sure he still had battery power. “Maurice, you there?”

Must have lost reception, thought Zach. That happened too often with these cell phones. Hit a dead patch and everything goes quiet.

forty-three

Morgan drank another martini, then walked out of the tavern and into the blizzard. Snow flew sideways, stung his face. He walked across the street bent almost in half against the wind. This was bullshit.

The snow was ankle deep, seeped into his socks. The lampposts along the main sidewalk were fuzzy blurs of light in the driving snow. It took fifteen minutes to trudge to the auditorium, a trip that usually took five. Morgan had to keep stopping and looking around to make sure he hadn’t taken a wrong turn. The campus looked unearthly and strange in the whirling mix of snow and pale lamplight.

They’ll cancel the reading, thought Morgan. How can they not? A sudden, unexpected, freak blizzard. The roads would be a mess. He had heard, in fact, a siren in the distance. Emergency services would be caught back on its heels. Nobody would risk the roads for poetry. Nobody would know Ellis had never even shown.

He finally made the auditorium and ducked into the lobby, stomping his feet and huffing for air. His vodka breath burned up his throat and out of his mouth in a toxic cloud.

He heard the crowd. Morgan cracked the door to the auditorium, peeked inside. The seats were filled. He scanned the throng. Professors and administrators in the front two rows. Bored students packed the rest of the place, chatting among themselves. A paper airplane sailed from the back row. A guy in a university sweatshirt leapt up from his seat and snatched it out of the air to the scattered applause of the adjacent rows.

The freshmen. Morgan remembered what Dean Whittaker had said about filling the seats with honor school freshmen. They’d only had to come from the dorms, didn’t need to drive or hunt for a parking space.

Jesus Christ Almighty. Morgan was well and truly fucked. A crowded auditorium and no Ellis. Morgan belched, tasted vodka, felt slightly dizzy.

He had to do something. The dean and the rest of the administration were expecting something special.

Well, fuck them. Morgan hiccuped. It wasn’t his goddamn fault Sherman Ellis was missing in action. What was he? A miracle worker? He couldn’t find a kid who’d disappeared off the fucking planet.

Still, just to show up empty-handed was pretty feeble.

Morgan scanned the crowd. There, in the back row, just coming through the door, were Bob Smith and Fred Jones. The big bruiser helped the old man into his seat.

Morgan suddenly had a bad idea, but it was better than no idea at all.

Dean Whittaker fidgeted in his seat, tugged at the band of the silk panties through his trousers. He usually liked wearing the panties, red with a little bow, and lace trimming. But he’d been shifting nervously, and the panties had crept into his ass crack. They also had a stranglehold on his scrotum.

Lincoln Truman sat to the dean’s right, a random vice president on his left. Various other department heads and community big shots in the front row, and someplace there was a chancellor.

And where the hell was Jay Morgan? The show was set to start any minute.

President Truman looked impatient and cross. Whittaker opened his mouth to say something reassuring to the president, but a young woman in a long, black dress came onstage and modest applause signaled the reading was under way.

Whittaker recognized the woman as one of the graduating MA students in creative writing. She had a pierced lip and eyebrow, bright orange hair pinned elaborately into sprouting tufts of hair that sprang out at odd angles. How the hell did she expect to get a job looking like that? Whittaker thought about his own daughter, who was in her third year at Kansas State. Would she come back pierced, covered with tattoos, trailing some long-haired “dude” who fronted a speed-metal band? The thought made him shudder. What the hell was going on with the world?

He fingered his panties, watched the orange-haired woman approach the podium.

“Good evening everyone, and thanks for attending Eastern Oklahoma University’s annual graduate poetry reading,” she said. “Usually we give this reading in the big classroom in Albatross Hall, but this year it’s been moved to the auditorium, because, as you can see, we’ve had one heck of a turnout!”

She paused for a burst of applause that never came.

She cleared her throat. “Our first reader will graduate with his master’s in English this spring. His poems have appeared in Word Junkie, Gas-hole, and Pea-Pickin’ Potpourri. Please welcome David Blanding.”